Ten Jovian days: The Voyager 1 Jupiter rotation movie

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ian Regan

Ten Jovian days: The Voyager 1 Jupiter rotation movie

Between 18:31 hours (UTC) on January 30 and 19:27 hours (UTC) on February 3, Voyager 1 took 3,636 NAC frames, shuttered through a repeating sequence of orange, green, and blue filters. Due to intermittent problems with the downlink between the spacecraft and the dishes of the Deep Space Network (DSN), more than a hundred of those images were lost forever, creating some gaps in the final rotation movie. Gaps are visible as noticeable jumps in the restored time-lapse sequence. The three most proximal Galilean moons all make cameo appearances, most notably a majestic transit of Ganymede, followed by its shadow a short time later. The low phase angle and equatorial vantage point provided ideal conditions for this historic observation. The movement seen in this video is a smoothed and averaged-out representation of the attitude of Voyager's scan platform as it took this sequence.